AVAILABLE NOW!

Haunted Dublin, by author and journalist Dave Walsh, gathers together in one succinct volume, well-known legends with rare and chilling accounts of the supernatural in the city. With poltergeists and apparitions, lore, myth and the downright scary, this fascinating work will delight and unsettle those brave enough to explore this hidden world.

Eleven years, three convictions, two deportations, ten thousand pints, six barring orders and a legion of leather-clad groupies later, Dave Walsh, Barry Kavanagh and Damien DeBarra (the cheap tarts that brought you Blather.net) bring you their latest labour of love: A Load of Blather: Unreal Reports from Ireland and Beyond, the first book that anyone has been nuts enough to let them publish. Shamelessly re-working articles which have been online for years anyway, this magnificent tome is a veritable smorgasboard of smut; bursting out of its trousers with a great heaving cavalcade of paranormal events, superstitions, mysterious happenings, conspiracy theories, hordes of rampaging kangaroos in the Dublin hills, and the previously untold story of General Michael Collins' forays into outer space. There's even a bit about talking cows in there. If the lawyers haven't cut it out. There's guest articles too, from the likes of Sue Walsh, Oliver Bayliss and Dr. Stewart Roberts.

This is the 1998 Warner Brothers edition, updating the first edition with new material. Reviewed for Blather by Angelique Stevenson:

Author William F. Pepper was the man who influenced MLK to oppose the Vietnam War. Quite some time later, convinced that his friend's supposed assassin was innocent, he became James Earl Ray's attorney. This book tells the story of Pepper's investigations into the assassination.

Ah, crop circles. Those magical mysteries left in the cornfields of England and other countries every summer by passing extraterrestrials, smack bang in the middle of ley lines energy lines, and fuck knows what else. But wait. They're really made by humans?

'Beyond Belief' is a concatenation of Liam Fay's religious writings
in the Irish music and current affairs magazine Hot
Press, a publication not particularly renowned for pulling its
punches. Fay himself is infuriatingly graced with a seldom witnessed
talent; the ability to heave his readership rolling into the aisles
with life-threatening paroxysms of laughter, by passing corny remarks
which made by anyone else would be intolerably dull.

"How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity"
- Last Words

This tender and moving book, lovingly edited by Burrough's longtime companion, James Grauerholz, may come as a surprise to those who know Burroughs as a scary old homosexual junky who penned *Naked Lunch*, the man who shot his wife in the head when performing a 'William Tell routine' or appeared as the heroin-addicted priest in *Drugstore Cowboy*. More true to life, Burroughs was one of the last true gentlemen, a radical of any era, a painfully sensitive and an untouchable writer.

It was with some hesitation that I chose to purchase Paul Devereux
and Peter Brookesmith's 'UFOs & Ufology'. I had read Bob Rickard's
review in Fortean Times 106, where he gave it an 'Excellent' rating,
and I have deep respect for both authors - I've cited Devereux's
endeavours in Blather before. But when I went to pay IEP£20 for their
new publication, I was a little taken aback. I held in my hand a
'coffee table' sized tome, with an almost abstract rendition of
'extra-terrestrial' in front of a saucer. 'Potboiler', I muttered,
and left it down. Eventually, after a few minutes thumbing through
the pages, pacing and beard stroking, I was away with a copy under my
arm.

Originally published in 1974, *The Hell-Fire Clubs - A History of
Anti-Morality* is Geoffrey Ashe's valuable study of the Knights of St.
Francis a.k.a. the Monks of Medmenham - erroneously referred to these
days as *The* Hell-Fire Club. This infamous mid-eighteenth century
organisation of Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Sandwich and John Wilkes
amongst others was, ironically, the most tasteful, contrived and the
least violent of all the groups of rich wastrels - the original
Hell-Fires, or Mohocks - who roamed the streets of London and Dublin,
literally raising hell.

Originally published in 1943-48 (in instalments), this great novel is by the celebrated Japanese writer Tanizaki (1886-1965). It is set in pre-war Osaka/Ashiya and concerns a formerly upper class family that has fallen into decline. The writing style in this book has been labelled *realism* but there is more than that in operation here.

William Shaw joined several cults in Britain, without telling its
members or leaders that he was a journalist. This book is the result.
The issues raised here are bigger than the title of the work would
suggest. There is more here than just the cult world of Britain. It
definitely has international value as a fascinating piece of research.

Franz Kafka's works remain as striking and as important to read after the 20th Century as they did during it. His writings came from an inner world and he wrote out of artistic compulsion: "The tremendous world I have in my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is clear to me." This compulsion is what separates the mind of the writer from the immersed reader. Perhaps as a writer he was the reluctant nightwatchman of "At Night", in which he wrote "Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there."

Over time, the Genesis 6-9 story of Noah, his Ark and the Flood has *taken on board* quite a number of different interpretations but it has also been a story that has had an affect on Western science and philosophy.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen-name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (1894-1961). Journey to the End of the Night, first published in 1932, is a semi-autobiographical novel that has been hailed as a masterpiece, with some justification. Its uninhibited, vernacular style makes it almost contemporary, perhaps even timeless.

Burgess (real name Anthony Wilson, 1917-93), influenced by Finnegans
Wake, invented for this semi-futuristic novel an extensive system
of 'futuristic' slang to be poured forth by the narrator, a violent
young street thug called Alex. The title of the book comes from
some real slang, the cockney phrase *as queer as a clockwork orange*,
meaning very strange indeed, guv'nor.

"...widespread awareness of Hebrew Qabalah in the West has often led to the mistaken belief that the Jews were the original founders of the literal Qabalah, and even that it was the Jews who first used letters as numbers... It was, in fact, the Greeks who, as early as the eighth century B.C.E., invented alphabetic numerals, the very essence of Qabalistic numerology" (preface p.xiii).

The Tomb of God - the Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2,000-year-old Mystery

Update your knowledge of the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery! What did the priest Berenger Sauniere find hidden in Rennes-le-Chateau, his parish in the South of France, in the late 19th Century? Whatever it was, it made him a rich man.

"Harpur has presented the evidence honestly and with a charming shot of whimsy. And what has he evidenced? That the collective human (and more than human) Psyche has a sense of humour, but far too few of us mere mortals have gotten the joke yet.
In this book Harpur sets out, like tawdry market wares, the irrational and comical side of Otherworldly phenomena, an aspect which is so frequently neglected in the popular literature on the Occult. But Harpur isn't setting out to poke fun at us mortals, nor is he pulling our leg. Instead he is trying to awaken us to the playful and comedic aspects of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul, from which springs phenomena as diverse as UFOs, elf-shot, Virgins of all faiths, phantasmic Social Workers, Men-In-Black and the playful dead.

I started reading this short book - I'm not sure it can really be classed as a novel, divided as it is into four parts - while flying between Dublin and Italy. As luck would have it, I didn't expect that a good half of the book would be set in early nineteenth century Venice - the next day day I was to visit Venice. And so, the tale of the Henri, and his worship of the that military deity, Napoleon Boneparte - to whom he serves chicken, and the parallel account of Villanelle, a beautiful web-footed Venetian girl with a penchant for cross-dressing set a scene for my experiences in what Henri describes as 'A city of madmen'.

From the writer probably most infamous for his penning of The Illuminatus! (trilogy co-written with Robert Shea) and the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy , comes a screenplay that he would dearly love to film. For those of you unfamiliar with the work of RAW (called 'the world's greatest writer-philosopher' by the Irish Times) -- which includes psychology, surrealist fiction and downright fortean material -- I'm not sure that I will convince you to read him, as the *The Walls Came Tumbling Down* is perhaps not the best of his books to start with, and so I'm going to talk more about the cautionary nature of the screenplay, rather than the screenplay itself.

Before procuring a copy of *mushroom.man* by Paolo Tullio, author of *North of Naples, South of Rome*, I was apprehensive -- even cynical -- about reading an Irish novel with a subplot which utilises an exchange of email message exchanges between the two first-person narrators. Indeed, I had an olfaction of bandwagon-hopping in pursuit of bestseller heaven.
I was however, wrong. *Mushroom.man* diluted my doubts, and for me, shook dust from old oxidised trains of thought with a clarity I've rarely encountered outside the works of Robert Anton Wilson or Paul Devereux.

h o l y f e c k !
Last month, I found myself several times guilty of the somewhat
unsavoury practice of engaging in brief conversation with prominent
authors, whilst hiding my embarrassment at not having totally immersed
myself in their literature. One such example was Mr. Bruce Sterling,
the man behind the legendary Dead
Media Project.

'Within the boundaries of this novel the reader will find: a murder thriller; a comic satire about an archetypal village police force; a surrealistic vision of eternity; the story of a tender, brief unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle; and a chilling fable of unending guilt.'

For a thirteen month period from November 1966 until December 1967, the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, USA was reportedly tipped into a state of chaos - overrun by UFOs, poltergeists, Men in Black in beyond-fashion-clothing driving impeccable old cars and fake service workers -- both groups had dark, sharp features, and wearing thick soled rubber shoes. If that wasn't bad enough, a surrealist abbatoirist left cattle cadavers strewn about the fields of Point Pleasant.

This is by no means a book that will entertain everyone, especially those
who are partial to a sweet slice of the extraterrestrial hypothesis,
i.e. that UFOs are most definitely craft from other worlds. Jung
attacks the phenomenon from (obviously enough) a sceptical and
psychological angle, with an emphasis on the *psychic* aspect,
and correctly predicts how 'ufology' was to spawn a plethora of
quasi-religious cults.

Asking 'who were the Celts and what were they up to?', Jones threads her way the linguistics and archaeology of the Celtic countries, tackling the apparent and dubious 'victory' of Christianity over paganism, and how our modern perception of the Celts has been coloured by politically motivated commentators of the last 500 years.

On first glance, *Japanese Movie Posters: Yakuza, Monster, Pink
and Horror* appears to be little more than a catalogue for
DH Publishing's movie poster business. The last page even provides
details on how to order the posters.

However, *Yakuza, Monster, Pink and Horror* is a delight in itself,
with 96 pages of katana waving gangsters, bald lesbian nuns, giant
pterodactyls, lizards and moths, hardy samurai made up like drag-queens,
and several scantily clad actresses in questionable fetish scenarios.

Charles Fort was a painstakingly erudite dissector of scientific texts
and a ravenous predator of scientific dogma, who scrutinized how
scientists formed their theories according to their own personal
views, rather than the weight of evidence available. Fort gleefully
trawled through the data that was suppressed, discarded or explained
away in a less than satisfactory manner. He referred to this this data
as 'damned'...

A collection of twenty-five stories from one of the most underrated writers of early 20th century science-fiction and fantasy, Dunsany is often said to have been a major influence on both Lovecraft and Tolkien. In our opinion, Dunsany - who lived in Ireland most of his life - is nearly untouchable in his talent for painting literary pictures of bizarre adventures in exotic, otherwordly realms...
- daev

Why are we selling this? Read the related Blather article, No Such Place.